Viewing By Day : November 7, 2004 / Main
November 7, 2004
Thoughts on Event Gateways
Now that Evet Gateways have officially gotten more coverage (ala MAX), we in the ColdFusion community need to start thinking about the possibilities they open. By piecing together everything we heard at MAX surrounding gateways, we know that Blackstone is going to ship with several included gateways:

  • Lotus Sametime Gateway (IM)
  • Jabber/XMPP Gateway (IM)
  • Directory Watcher Gateway(Looks for new additions to a file system directory)
  • SMS Gateawy (for sending/receiving SMS text messages)
  • Asynchronous CFML Gateway (for multi-threaded CFML invocations)

Beyond these gateways, it would be fairly simple (provided you know a little Java) to create additional gateways for communicating with all sorts of additional technologies via protocols other than HTTP. Considering the possibilities, this means you (or a third party) could write a telnet gateway, a gateway for connecting to a messaging service such as JMS (Sean Corfield has already mentioned he's worked on this for an internal project) or MQ Series, or a gateway for communicating with the X10 protocol. The list goes on and on. Themain point here is that the possibilities are limitless.

This also opens up a potential new revenue stream for companies wanting to produce and support commercial gateway add-ons for ColdFusion. So, if you don't know Java but need a gateway for a particular application, chances are that a solution would be available from either an open-source or commercial provider.

The coolest thing about gateways, though, is that you only need to know Java if you want to write your own. To use and existing gateway, you only need to know ColdFusion as all gateways are implemented via CFCs.

What uses for Event Gateways are you thinking about?

Posted At : 11:13 AM. | Posted By : rbils | Link | ColdFusion | Comments (4)